Reformed Churchmen

We are Confessional Calvinists and a Prayer Book Church-people. In 2012, we remembered the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer; also, we remembered the 450th anniversary of John Jewel's sober, scholarly, and Reformed "An Apology of the Church of England." In 2013, we remembered the publication of the "Heidelberg Catechism" and the influence of Reformed theologians in England, including Heinrich Bullinger's Decades. For 2014: Tyndale's NT translation. For 2015, John Roger, Rowland Taylor and Bishop John Hooper's martyrdom, burned at the stakes. Books of the month. December 2014: Alan Jacob's "Book of Common Prayer" at: http://www.amazon.com/Book-Common-Prayer-Biography-Religious/dp/0691154813/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417814005&sr=8-1&keywords=jacobs+book+of+common+prayer. January 2015: A.F. Pollard's "Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation: 1489-1556" at: http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Cranmer-English-Reformation-1489-1556/dp/1592448658/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420055574&sr=8-1&keywords=A.F.+Pollard+Cranmer. February 2015: Jaspar Ridley's "Thomas Cranmer" at: http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Cranmer-Jasper-Ridley/dp/0198212879/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422892154&sr=8-1&keywords=jasper+ridley+cranmer&pebp=1422892151110&peasin=198212879

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

AMiE: Robin's Jordan's Take on AMiE

By Robin G. Jordan

The Book of Common Prayer
of 1662 is, with the Articles of Religion of 1571 and the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons of 1661, the long-recognized doctrinal standard of Anglicanism. In Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today A Commentary on the Jerusalem Declaration, the GAFCON Theological Resource Group draw to our attention that the Jerusalem Declaration calls the Anglican Church back to the Thirty-Nine Articles as being a faithful testimony to the teaching of Scripture, which excludes erroneous beliefs and practices and gives a distinctive shape to Anglican Christianity. The Jerusalem Declaration also affirms the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

As the late Peter Toon observed, the Anglican Church does not need a Magisterium. The Anglican Church has its venerable formularies—the Thirty-Nine Articles, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and 1661 Ordinal. They are the Magisterium of the Anglican Church.

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is substantially the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, which reflects Archbishop Cranmer’s mature thinking on eucharistic sacrifice and eucharistic presence. It is his legacy to the Anglican Church. It is for his rejection of the Medieval Catholic doctrines of the Sacrifice of the Mass and Transubstantiation that Cranmer suffered martyrdom in the reign of Edward VI’s older sister Mary.

In the transitional 1549 Prayer Book Cranmer did away with the oblation of the bread and wine in the Offertory—the Minor Oblation—and the oblation of the bread and wine in the Canon—the Major Oblation. He had also placed a rubric prohibiting any elevation of the elements or showing of the elements to the people before the anamnesis and the oblation of the Church in the Canon. In the 1552 Prayer Book Cranmer took the further step of removing the oblation of the Church from the Prayer of Consecration and placing it after the distribution of Communion, after the Lord’s Prayer, where the Church’s oblation of thanksgiving and praise and self could not be misunderstood to be anything else other than the Church’s response to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross at Cavalry and the benefits of his death that Christ offers to those who trust in him for their salvation, the same benefits that Christ gives to faithful who gather in humble obedience to his command to celebrate the Lord’s Supper as the memorial of his death and passion.

While the Caroline divines and John and Charles Wesley may have entertained the unscriptural notion of the church’s pleading Christ’s death for the remission of our own and others’ sins in union with Christ as he supposedly pleads his earthly sacrifice before God’s throne, they did not incorporate this notion into the liturgy when they had an opportunity to do so—the Laudians at the Restoration and John Wesley in his abbreviation of the 1662 Prayer Book for American Methodists. The 1662 Prayer Book rejects as not consonant with Scripture any notion of the Lord’s Supper as a reiteration or representation of Christ’s sacrifice or a participation in the ongoing sacrificial activity of Christ. The only sacrifices to which the 1662 Prayer Book refers are Christ’s sacrifice on the cross at Calvary and the Church’s sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise and self in response to that sacrifice. This is the doctrinal position of historic Anglicanism as articulated by the 1662 Prayer Book.

For more see:
http://anglicansablaze.blogspot.com/2011/07/is-anglican-mission-needed-in-united.html

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